#10: A second go at a non-Game Boy portable (Nintendo DS, 2004)
During the Game Boy era, Nintendo created another portable console that would follow in the same line as the Virtual Boy. This console, the Nintendo DS, was something that the Virtual Boy wasn't - a success. The DS was more of a mimic of Tiger's Game.com portable released a few years before: both portables have a touch screen, are capable of 3-D graphics, and are capable of online play. Of course, the DS managed to make success out of these innovations and then some. People were a little skeptical about the Nintendo DS and the fact that it has not one but two screens, changing their style of play. However, the DS has proven to be a worthy console and has been able to compete against its rival the PSP (made by Sony) in terms of sales.

#9: Metroid goes First-Person with a Second Party (Metroid Prime, 2002)
When Nintendo announced that Retro Studios - a American game designer who was second party to Nintendo - was going to be making the first ever Metroid game in 3-D, people weren't happy. Adding to these second party shananigans was the fact that Retro was going to make the game appear in a first-person perspective, scaring fans into thinking that the franchise was ruined with this altered game-play. However, when Metroid Prime was released in 2002, it recieved a grand ammount of positive feedback and went on to not only become Player's Choice, but also to earn itself two more sequels from the Texas-based company.

#8: Complete ownership of Rare - $377,000,000 (GameCube and X-Box, 2002)
On November of 2002, the Stamper brothers sold their stock of Rare to Microsoft. Nintendo, owning 49% of the company, also sold their share to Microsoft. The grand total of the company overall reached $377 million dollars, with this Rare became first-party to Microsoft and the rights to Rare's characters (excluding those from Donkey Kong and Star Fox) were now Microsoft property. Gamers were upset with Nintendo's decision to sell their ownership of Rare to a rival company, especially considering that Rare was a big help during the Nintendo 64 era, and many believed it to be Nintendo's demise. However, Nintendo is still able to maintain itself without Rare, and the fact that the only two games Rare made on the X-Box (Grabbed by the Ghoulies and Conker: Live and Reloaded) sold poorly, the Nintendo company most likely regrets their decision not.

#7: Life without the PlayStation... (CD-I, 1991)
When Nintendo was hoping to make a CD-ROM attachment to their Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES), they originally turned to Sony. Sony was going to make an attachment called the PlayStation for Nintendo's home console, but Nintendo refused when Sony insisted on taking full licensing revenue on games released for the CD-ROM attachment. With this, Nintendo turned to Phillips to make a CD-ROM variant. This came to be known as the CD-I, a console best noted for the one Mario game and the three Zelda titles that appeared on it. The CD-I was expensive, and when Sony released the PlayStation in their own revenue, the CD-I came off to be a horrific failure and died early. Even to this day, gamers sit and wonder about what would've happened if Nintendo and Sony had coped to make the PlayStation as one.

#6: Video games are not just a fad! (NES, 1985)
Despite the success of Donkey Kong, the company sooned faced some difficulties when the gaming industry overall crashed in 1983. From here, many games were often being put into the bargain bin quickly and were often low-quality titles. Many began to look at video gaming as "just a fad", and a passing one at that. Atari, once at the top of this "fad", did little to help. Then, in 1985, Nintendo released the NES in North America. With the Nintendo Entertainment System's 8-Bit processor, a special licensing technique (where games would have to earn Nintendo's Seal of Quality and required a code to detect the Nintendo licensing to work), and of course a new standard for video games (crafted by Super Mario Bros., released in the same as the NES), Nintendo was able to end the video game crash and become the number one gaming company until the mid-to-late 1990's, when Sony took that position. Even to this day, the NES was the best-selling console of all time and is considered one of the greatest consoles ever by many older gamers (next to the SNES).
#5: The Rise of a Company: Make or Break (Donkey Kong, 1981)
When Nintendo wanted to get in on the action of the video game boom that occurred, they originally made an arcade title called Radar Scope. Nintendo of America ordered a lot of these titles, but when they arrived, interest in the game was lost and it instead turned out to be a huge flop. Then, Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauche turned to Shigeru Miyamoto to save the company with a new game that the Radar Scope machines could be processed into. It was here that Mr. Miyamoto would either make or break the company. Gaining a small group of workers, Miyamoto used his mind to create Donkey Kong. This arcade title came off to be a huge hit and placed Nintendo in the field of video gaming. Even to this day, gamers continue to commend Mr. Miyamoto for being the sole reason as to why Nintendo has made it so far in the video game industry.

#4: The Legend of CELda (The Wind Waker, 2003)
A real shocker for Zelda fans was when Nintendo revealed their new Zelda title for the GameCube to feature CEL-shading. With this, the game looked far different from its other 3-D Zeldas (Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask) by looking more like a cartoon than having a realistic theme. Many were extremely skeptical, wondering what had gotten into Nintendo's heads with this CEL-shading. Upon the game's release, however, many were able to adore the graphics and love the game-play even more. However, many were still upset with the title, feeling it didn't match up to that of past 3-D Zeldas. However, the CEL-shading was liked enough to spawn a few more more titles using this saucer-eyed variant of Link, including Four Swords Adventures and The Minish Cap. Only recently has Nintendo dropped this Link to bring back the realistic variant in Twilight Princess, which is believed to be the most anticipated game of 2006.

#3: Gunpei Yokoi's Dark Age (Virtual Boy, 1995)
In 1995, Nintendo released what was marketed as a portable console. By which I mean the Virtual Boy, a portable not labeled as a Game Boy successor, but rather something else (much like the Nintendo DS). The Virtual Boy was created by Gunpei Yokoi, the same man who made the Game & Watch portables and even the Game Boy in 1989. With Yokoi making this new console, it wasn't expected to fail. It sadly did for multiple reasons: First off, the console was labeled as a "portable", yet it wasn't too portable due to it's weight and size. Also, it was known for causing back pains, eyesores, and even headaches. With the failure of the Virtual Boy, Gunpei entered a phase of depression and was sometimes joked at by his co-workers, following quickly was his resignation and his untimely death in a car accident in 1997. Despite the failure of the much-hyped Virtual Boy, many of us gamers still mourn for Gunpei Yokoi for his great contributions to Nintendo. Rest in Peace, Gunpei...

#2: Cartridges > Discs??? (Nintendo 64, 1996)
A while before the Nintendo even came out, Nintendo announced that their third generation console, the Nintendo 64 (also known as the Ultra 64 or even the N64), would not be using discs, but rather sticking with cartridges. This was a baffling aspect to gamers, especially considering that both Sony's Playstation and Sega's Saturn would be supporting discs. There were pros to staying with cartridges; for instance, there would be no loading times (this was especially noticeable for multiplatform games). Also, pirating cartridges was harder and more expensive, and the fact that many N64 didn't require a memory card to save data helped. However, there were cons, as well: Cartridges were more costly to produce (while most Playstation games rarely went over $50, some N64 titles went as high as $70 or even $80), plus their limited ROM space made for blockier graphics (despite a higher polygon count). In the end, however, Nintendo managed to come out in second place, besting Sega and Atari, but falling short of Sony's console. Despite these events, many still look at the Nintendo 64 and its library of quality titles as an excellent console with plenty of fun games only Nintedo could deliver.

#1: The Gamer's Remote Control (Revolution, 2006)
During September's Tokyo Game Show in Japan in 2005, Nintendo revealed their brand new controller for their next-gen console, the Revolution. This controller has remained a mystery since Iwata refused to reveal it on E3 2005 back in May. The controller showed itself to resemble a fusion of a television remote control and an I-Pod, thus recieving mixed reviews from American gamers - despite the fact that many game designers, including the creators of Final Fantasy and Metal Gear Solid, have commented on it, claiming it is an interesting concept that will make good use of gaming. Even now, many American gamers are very skeptical about the Revolution controller, some even saying that this will royally slaughter the company. However, we have yet to truly know how this remote will fare in America, let alone the global market. The answer as to whether this remote is to be a big hit or a horrible miss will be revealled come 2006.

Gaming has evolved significantly over the years. The industry has expanded greatly, introducing dozens of new genres, playstyles and markets. However, despite this expansion, several facets of gaming have been abandoned, lost to the mists of time. The reasons for this are varied. Sometimes technology improves and a particular style of game is no longer feasible. Sometimes it becomes economically unviable to continue supporting a certain trend. Sometimes, the very nature of gaming simply changes, slowly and subtly, and things get phased out.

The home consoles of today have their roots in arcade games and a few trends birthed by the necessities of that era still exist in modern gaming. One of the most intrinsic, and the one that has taken the longest to die out, is the concept of Lives. Lives were introduced in arcade games as a way of limiting play time and drawing more quarters out of the player. After a certain number of player deaths (typically three), the machine would count down from 10 and the game would restart unless the player inserted another quarter before the timer was up. The inspiration for this trend was strictly monetary; if a player actually wanted to see a game through to completion, they would have to drop in more quarters. And if they didn’t, it meant they were removed from the machine faster so that another player (with another quarter) could step up and try his luck. Yet when gaming made the jump into players’ living rooms, this trend stubbornly followed. Though the need for it was gone, developers used it nonetheless (sometimes even with the 10 second Game Over countdown, seemingly for no reason at all). Originally, it was sometimes used to add in difficulty to games, or to artificially lengthen them so that they couldn’t be beaten in an hour by a first-time player. But as games grew in length and started introducing save points and other life-independent methods of preserving a player’s status, lives became more of a formality, held onto out of a sense of convention than any real need. Frequently, the only real consequence of a lost life, or even a game over, was that the player had to spend a minute or two returning to the location he died at before continuing on as normal. As gaming moved into the 64 bit era, a new radical game design began to take root where the player had unlimited lives. After all, if a game over was functionally the same as a death, what was the point in having a finite number of lives in the first place? Slowly but surely this new idea began to catch on and soon one of gaming’s oldest traditions began to disappear. Most modern games do not have a life system and the handful that do seldom make much of it. It’s just another piece of gaming history that the industry seems to have outgrown. Yet it wasn’t too long ago where dying wasn’t just a possibility to avoid, it was a veritable inevitability. Old arcade games frequently had the difficulty ramped up so high, death was pretty much impossible to avoid and how far you could get in the game was determined not by your skill but by how many quarters you had sitting beside the buttons. Games like Metal Slug were notorious for this; in the later levels, you barely had enough time to throw your 10 grenade stock before you would be killed by a stray bullet. You could measure the levels in how much it would cost in quarters to see it through to the end. But with the decline of arcade games in general, this is a trend that has pretty much seen its last.

1958 saw the release of Tennis for Two, the predecessor to Pong. Visually, the game was almost identical to the eventual arcade version -- so why did it take 15 years for the game to hit arcades? This highlights one of the most underappreciated early challenges of the gaming industry. The problem wasn't creating the games -- the problem was distributing them. By their nature, games are only useful if they can get an audience. The majority of games written in the 1970's could have been implemented using the technology of the 50's -- but the issue came in distribution. Early games required room-sized computers to run and cost thousands of dollars, obviously not feasible for profitable sale. For 15 years, the gaming industry sat on its hands and waited for the technology to catch up. That's an exaggeration, of course -- the industry didn't actually exist, but in many ways the bottleneck was in waiting for the technology. In 1951, Ralph Baer pitched the idea of a TV-based video game console, only to have it turned down as unfeasible. Baer would have the last laugh, going on to invent the Magnavox Odyssey and the original light gun, and still receives royalties from many modern game companies for use of his patents.

Picking a game of the year for 1982 is difficult. In case you're not aware of why, here's a history lesson. In 1982, the library of games for the Atari 2600 exploded -- and not in a good way. Legitimized by a court case between Atari and the newly-formed Activision, every company from movie producers to dog food companies (no, really) got in on the game, hiring inexperienced programmers to cobble together terrible games with an 8-week development time, reselling them at a huge profit. It only took a few months of this for the market to realize, "hey, these games suck", leading to what is commonly referred to as the video game crash of 1983. Fortunately, arcade games, due to the already high distribution costs, were somewhat immune from the crash, and thus kept the market alive for a while.

A game created in 1983 by the Coca-cola, in their oh-so-subtle anti-Pepsi ad campaigns. This game plays exactly like the original space invaders, however, instead of shooting aliens, you are shooting the letters P, E, P, S, and I, followed by an alien, because PEPSI couldn't fill the screen. Worth a play if you like this kind of stuff, but unless you've never played Space Invaders before, you aren't missing much.